The Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions support researchers at all stages of their careers, regardless of age and nationality. Researchers working across all disciplines are eligible for funding. The MSCA also support cooperation between industry and academia and innovative training to enhance employability and career development.

Thanks to the wide range of resources available – both from the Marie Curie fellowship and the institution – and the breadth of interests represented by my supervisors, I knew I would be guided into a successful career as independent investigator.

Applying for my own research funding was an important step for my research career. Having completed one postdoctoral position already, I needed to be able to demonstrate my potential to attract research funding. The Marie Curie fellowship was an excellent opportunity to do this and they substantially increased the likelihood of both future funding and a permanent research position down the line.

The Marie Curie fellowship gave me a real chance to learn new scientific techniques, in my case, running fluid dynamic experiments. The benefits of the grant are simply that I am now working in a new country with new people and new challenges.

I applied for a Marie Curie fellowship a few months after I defended my thesis. I was working on fundamental aspects of the physics of materials, investigating how materials break, from the atomic to the macroscopic scale. This study inspired me many ideas on how to design stronger materials.

My Marie Curie fellowship has so far allowed me to choose a research topic to which I had had no previous exposure, but which I was fully scientifically ready to tackle, and to start making my own way towards producing original results.

The Marie Curie fellowship is an important opportunity to develop my research on visual studies and on semiotic-social meanings of images: modernity and advertising poster in Paris at the beginning of 20th century.

The Marie Curie International Reintegration Grant represents a prestigious type of funding and it undoubtedly helped in further supporting the evolution of my career from post-doctoral scientist to independent principal investigator and research team leader.